Building green starts with the intention of the owner, then the designer, followed by the architect. It doesn’t stop there. Before electronic plans, subcontractors had little choice but to sift through mountains of project drawings to find something applicable and interesting to them. Construction automation changed the game in the 1990s and again in the mid-2000s.
Electronic plans were introduced just prior to the 1990s, eliminating the need for paper plans. Construction professionals easily find their plans digitized, organized, catalogued, and synchronized by using plan rooms and online project centers. This step alone allows companies to be more socially responsible by minimizing paper waste. The electronic plans are easily loaded into the software, which results in huge savings by eliminating printing costs. A contractor no longer has to pay a print shop hundreds of dollars to print out plans for a job that they may not even win. Electronic plans do not have to be physically stored for future reference in a company’s warehouse; plans can reside on a server or computer hard drive for access years from now without any deterioration in quality.